SAFE, or Secure Architectural Framework Enhancements employs a small change in computational architecture to effect a significant change in the architecture’s security model. Its primary goal is to significantly change the operational security mechanism for computing in general (sensor-controllers to supercomputers), while preserving application software, minimizing operational cost, and maximizing performance. SAFE offers compatibility with legacy application binaries, that it is faster, lower power, and simpler than the legacy architecture it replaces; and that most importantly is secureable.
SAFE is a hardware-based containerization technology that replaces the lowest levels of fungible Operating System (OS) software with hardware. SAFE’s primary security mechanism is the universal application of a hardware managed, hierarchically cached, Address Space (AS) model that relies on indices (tags) to select one Address Space Tag (AST) from a plethora of concurrently accessible ASTs.